Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review.
(Date approximate).
The house in which his mother and stepfather now lived was
cheaply flashy "ranch," but the other house was the true house, the
house of memory, pain, repetition.
"The Collector of Hearts New Tales of the Grotesque" (1998)
HB: Your two recent books of stories, "Collector of
Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque" and "Haunted: Tales of the
Grotesque", are devoted explicitly to the gothic and grotesque. But these
have always been elements in your work.
JCO: I think so. I'm interested in what we call Gothic
literature. To me, it's surreal, which doesn't mean it's necessarily a category
distinct from realistic writing. We do have dreams every night, which are
surreal. We have nightmares, with very beautiful and improbably images, and yet
that's real, our psychic life is real, in a sense, to us. The distinction
between real and surreal is always porous.
JCO: I edited a collection of Lovecraft, and wrote quite a
lengthy introduction. He had a very dark sensibility. His father had syphilis and
went mad. He saw his father go crazy when he was very very young. His mother
also was mentally unbalanced. He grew up in an atmosphere of terror, and
experienced the world through that prism of terror. I'm not sure I would really
align myself with that. I like Lovecraft but as you know his creatures are
physically bizarre. They look like comic strip demons and monsters.
HB: In "Nightmare on Main Street: Angels,
Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic" (1997), Mark Edmundson argues
that we're undergoing a culture wide involvement in the Gothic. I don't know
about that, but I can easily think of plenty of current television shows that
play on that sensibility.
JCO: I've seen the X-files. The concepts are very
interesting, but the execution is not quite as interesting. In Kafka, the
concepts are extraordinary and the execution is also extraordinary. I think
with popular culture, the concepts can be very imaginative though perhaps not
original, but the execution tends to be on the level of mass market.
I have read some Stephen King, and I like his short stories.
In his short stories he is so much more concise. He's writing for an audience
of millions of people, and if he writes a 700 page novel it has to have a lot
of action. I'm not that interested in action; I'm more interested in metaphor
or the reaction of an intelligent person. So I tend to prefer the short
stories, where the concepts are usually very imaginative but you don't have to
struggle through hundreds of pages of action and cinematic effects. Stephen King
is a very gifted storyteller in a certain mode; maybe he's to be compared with
Stephen Spielberg. They're very popular storytellers who relate to millions of
people.
The kind of writing I'm interested in, which might be called
Kafkaesque, doesn't appeal to very many people, as my own writing doesn't
appeal to very many people. For instance, a great gothic work that I love is
"The Turn of the Screw." I think that's elegant.
HB: So elegant it's easy to miss what's going on.
JCO: It's ambiguous because it's very subjective. You don't
know whether the governess is seeing a reality or not. It's been made into an
opera by Benjamin Britten, a wonderful opera but the ghosts are real; you see
them, they're very Lawrentian, sensuous. Peter Quipp is a physical presence,
rather erotic. And so some of the mystery is gone. Whereas in the novel, you
don't really know, so I think the novel is a superior work .
HB: Is there a reason why there's interest in the Gothic
now?
JCO: There's always been some interest. We always have a way
of projecting our own anxieties out onto somebody else. In the 1950s it tended
to be the possibility of nuclear war, which was real, and of invasions from
other planets, UFOs. I guess UFOs are still popular. And then there's the
millennium. People are pretending to be worried about that.
HB: Pretending?
JCO: I'm baffled that anyone could take it seriously, that
the year 2,000 has any meaning. Of course it does in terms of computers. But this
is just our calendar. There are other cultures in the world where it isn't
2,000. The year 2,000 is just a symbol. But I guess people can fantasize about
it. There are people who have apocalyptic yearnings. I guess they're serious.
To me, it would be a pretense. I couldn't possibly think that 2000 means
anything different from 1999.
HB: Everyone knows that sex sells. But the primary force you
rely on is fear. At least in the new stories, deep fear is predominant.
JCO: It seems to based on primeval experiences, maybe in
childhood or dreams, feelings of intense anxiety that go back to infancy. I
would place it more in the human psyche than in anything supernatural. I'm a very
skeptical person, I don't believe in the supernatural, If I'm writing about a
person who's haunted he or she would be haunted by a psychic phenomenon.
HB: And what you have that's Jamesian, rather Stephen
Kingian, is deniability, meaning a lot of the stories can be understood as
dreams or delusions of some sort.
JCO: Definitely. That's the kind of writing that interests
me. And I'm so interested in language. Each of my stories is an experiment with
a certain kind of voice. When I read I read for voice; that's why it's hard for
me to read just anything, because I'm mainly interested in the language.
I have such a joyous feeling if I think I'm writing
something like a fairy tale, or a parable, a "once upon a time." It
doesn't seem that the story only has to be set in a certain place and certain time.
It might be universal, and there's a kind of happiness in writing that way.
You're not just writing about yourself or your parents. I've very drawn to that
kind of language, in my reading, too.
HB: What kind of reading do you do?
JCO: I read very variously. I do a lot of cluster reading,
that is, I'll read everything by one writer or I'll read everything on a subject.
It's kind of obsessive, and has been that way since junior high school. For
instance, if I get interested in Chekov, I will read all his plays, many short
stories, a couple of biographies, and maybe talk to people who translate
Chekov. Chekov is THE interest.
HB: A fixation?
JCO: A fixation. I review for the New York Review of Books
quite often and they urge you to do this kind of reading; they keep sending you
more books. The most recent focus is about Joan Benet Ramsey, the six years old
girl who was found dead in Colorado. It's a case that's been investigated since
1996. I've read about four or five books on that subject.
HB: Do often you take the news as a starting point for your
work?
JCO: Rarely. There has to be some sort of personal
connection. But once and a while something does stay in my mind. The very
opening of that "What I lived For, was taken from something that really happened.
While writing this novel, I remembered a strange image of a man cut down that
I'd read about some years before: a car goes by, he's riddled with bullets and
dies while putting a Christmas wreath up on his door. That's the first
paragraph of "What I lived For" and the act radiates through the
novel.
HB: You employ an almost baffling number of point of points
of view in your work.
JCO: I'm very interested in human beings of different perspectives.
I'm actually looking for a new subject at the moment. I just finished a novel
the other day, and it was such a long novel and such an exhausting experience
that I feel now, and this is confirmed by the sunshine, like I've been in a
cave for ten months.
HB: What is the novel?
JCO: There's not much point in talking about it now. I don't
even know if or when it will be published. It's about the childhood and womanhood
of the person we know as Marilyn Monroe. It's going to take a while to get over
that novel.
HB: The element that seemed very dreamlike in "The
Collector of Hearts" is that often you can see what's going to happen
miles down the road, and you can't move. You're not building suspense about the
unexpected. There's not much element of surprise. It's the opposite; there's
the dreamlike terror of being unable to run when water's rising.
JCO: That's interesting, what you're saying.
HB: Sometimes your characters suffer so terribly that the
reader's heart opens, or mine does. I'm thinking in particular of the brief powerful
story of the old people, one of whom is found dead. It ends with a cop saying,
that's nothing, come see what's in the bathroom.
JCO: This is something that can happen and has happened. We
read about people whose houses or apartments are broken into. Who knows who has
done it? Maybe the kids from next door.
HB: There's nothing supernatural in this story. The real
world is so bad it takes on the character of the supernatural.
JCO: I'm glad you like that. It's such a horrifying little
story. I was sort of thinking of myself and my husband, to tell the truth. I had
a horrible fantasy of people coming in the house Q it could be kids looking for
a something Q they're in and out in five minutes and your life is gone.
HB: I also wanted to mention "The Affliction"
about the artist who makes work out of sores, rashes, things growing out of his
own body. In some ways that's the romantic notion of the artist, it's Thomas
Mann writing about illness and inspiration. But you literalize it. The artist
actually uses growths that emerge from his body.
JCO: I was thinking of Goya. Goya's vision is so dark. I was
thinking of Francis Bacon, and others who have this nightmarish quality. Then I
suppose I was thinking of myself. We're restless; we can't stay still. I'm so
impatient with things as they are. I always feel restless about needing to
create art.
HB: Where does a piece start for you typically? Do you see a
plot?
JCO: It starts with restlessness. [coughs]. I was talking
too personally about myself and I started coughing. Did you notice that? As
soon as I started talking this way my throat caught. It means I shouldn't be
saying this.
HB: Let me try another approach. If you cough, we'll back
off. There's a lot of childhood and adolescence in your stories. Do you have a profound
feeling for childhood or are you thinking of some trauma of your own?
JCO: It's a good question. I think we forget so much, so
much is amnesia. That's why I have a story that just has a black rectangle as its
name. Things come toward the main character like blanks. Black rectangles,
amnesiac things.
HB: Lacunae.
JCO: Exactly. I'm sure I have a lot of them in my own life.
I'm sure I had a lot of good things, too. One of the reasons I wrote about Marilyn
Monroe is that to me she's a quintessential childhood and adolescent figure.
She really never grew up. She never had a real childhood. She was the daughter
of a woman who was schizophrenic and she had no father. She was always
insecure, and many adolescents are extremely insecure. I identify with that.
HB: What surprised me about one of the stories, "Hand
Puppet," is that it turned out to be about the mother. It seemed it was
going to be about the young daughter and her horrible puppet.
JCO: I can tell you where I got that idea from. I had a
student, maybe 15 years ago, a young woman with a puppet. She was very gifted
but very disturbed. You could just see the strangeness in her. She was able to
express herself through the puppet but it was not very pleasant.
HB: The twist is that puppets are such natural habitats for
demons. I expected to find out more about the puppet, and that's not at all
what happens.
JCO: No, the mother sees that her daughter is her own
puppet. The mother has this malevolent puppet daughter who herself has the real
puppet. I don't have any children but it must be the most profound and hideous
experience to realize that one of your own children is an evil person. We know
there are monsters in the world. Jeffrey Daumer did have parents. His parents
had to look at him one day and say, we are the parents of Jeffrey Daumer.
HB: You spoke about restlessness driving you to a story.
What do you think of initially? Is there a mood? Some sort of plot outline?
JCO: I get very excited. I like to go running. I love to
run. It's a beautiful day today with blue skies, so I'll go running. And when
I'm running my mind will be sort of like a hawk and it will find something to
focus upon. I'm doing revisions for the Marilyn Monroe novel, taking out
sections and making them into short stories. I'm in the phase now where I'm
swooping around my own novel.
So it begins with a feeling of excitement; it's very
visceral; I want to write something exciting and something new and something profound,
at least to me. But at the same time, I don't have to hunt, really, because I
have a whole store of things that I remember. And I'm very interested in
people. So when I go running I might think, well, there is that person, I
always wanted to write about that person. And I always wanted to write about
Nantucket Island, because I fall in love with places. So I put them together.
Sometimes it begins with a place, and sometimes with a person and place that
are absolutely connected.
HB: There's often a tension in your work between decorum and
some romantic and destructive impulse. I'm thinking of "I Lock My Door
Upon Myself".
JCO: Wow, that novel's very close to my heart. I can tell
you I could not have written that without the setting. When my parents read
that my mother said, oh, I know right where that is. The old mill and the hill,
and the creek and all these places from my girlhood. I was thinking of my own
grandmother and the mysteries in her life. I loved her very much and we look
alike. My grandmother actually was Jewish, and that was not known at the time.
HB: What about Calla, the main character of "I Lock My
Door Upon Myself"? She is kind of a wild child.
JCO: She talks to herself, she drifts around, she sleeps
outside.
HB: She doesn't care about bathing, dressing.
JCO: I could be that way, I suppose. It's just convention
that makes us live in houses. Like Calla, I grew up in the country and wandered
around the fields and into the creek and into the woods. I could go tramping
through fields for hours. A lot of what Calla does are things I did myself, I'd
go into barns and run across fields. My great happiness is running. That's
something I've been doing since I was very little. It seems to exclude a social
world, a world of human relations and yet I wonder if I could get any happiness
from this activity if I didn't have human relations. I've been married for 38 years.
I'm taking for granted something somebody else may not have.
HB: I've read, and I hope you don't mind me alluding to
this, that your sister is autistic.
JCO: Yes, that's true.
HB: Has that played a role in your fiction?
JCO: It's played a role in my life. I often write about
twins. My sister looks like me. She was born on my birthday. She's 18 years younger
than I am. And she's never uttered a coherent word. She is my opposite number.
I'm called prolific and she's never spoken.
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